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Monday, February 24, 2014

Ranciere, Greenberg, Whitman

I’m currently working on the third chapter of my book on
Rancière and philosophy, part of which was recently delivered at the Aesthetic Experience conference here in Ottawa. As often happens, the final paper didn’t sound too much like the
abstract. While I promised a reconsideration of Schiller, I ended up
spending much more time on a reconsideration of Greenberg’s
modernism—contrasted, at different points, with Baudelaire, Benjamin, Rancière,
and Schiller (I also spend more time on Greenberg because, as it turns out, I'll be developing a reading of Schiller that responds to Kant, Fichte, and finally Schelling's concerns as I've outlined them in F&NSPA). The space I’ve dedicated to Greenberg in the third chapter (it’s about
2000 words or so) is warranted because Rancière claims, in a recent interview in Ranciere Now,
that ‘the dominant modernist paradigm (the Greenbergian theorization of the
avant-garde) is in fact a liquidation of the dominant tendency of the aesthetic
regime, which is to abolish the boundaries between “mediums,” between high art
and popular art, and ultimately between art and life.’

Untitled, 1957

In developing an
interpretation of Greenberg, I found a passage that lends support to Rancière’s
opposition between Whitman and Greenberg. (Not to mention that Greenberg is criticizing Clyfford Still, who was one of the first abstract artists I really appreciated--for reasons that might be entirely contingent, because several of Still's works are exhibited in the SFMOMA). In
Aisthesis, Rancière argues that Greenberg’s modernism repudiates the ‘cultural
democracy [of art] stemming from Whitman,’ and while the case is strong, he does not cite an explicit
case where Greenberg castigates Whitman for being, at least in part, kitsch (though note that in ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch,’ Greenberg singles out John Steinbeck’s work
as a hybrid of modern art and kitsch). However, later, in ‘“American-Type”
Painting,’ Greenberg praises Still’s work, with the caveat that

Still’s
uncompromising art has its own affinity with popular or bad taste. It is the
first body of painting I know of that asks to be called Whitmanesque in the
worst as well as the best sense, indulging as it does in loose and sweeping
gestures, and defying certain conventions…in the same gauche way that
Whitman defied meter. And just as Whitman’s verse assimilated to itself
qualities of stale journalistic and oratorical prose, Still’s painting
assimilates to itself some of the stalest and most prosaic painting of our
time…the kind of open-air painting in autumnal colors…which has spread among
half-trained painters only since Impressionism became popular.

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